This isn’t a perfect book, but it’s exactly my kind of imperfect book, and I adored it.
I think I will continue to read pretty much anything Cashore writes. Sometimes, a writer is just telling your sort of stories, you know?
Other scattered thoughts:
– FIRE is a better written book than GRACELING, both its prose and its structure, but I didn’t love it more for that. I didn’t love it less, either, though.
– I did love Katsa more than Fire, at least at first. It took more time for Fire to gain a hold on me, for me to care about her. But I very much did care about Fire, by the end.
– I love the way Cashore’s female characters, both physically and emotionally, are in control of their relationships–how they have wants and needs and consider those front and center without apology. It makes me realize that fewer relationship stories allow for this than one might think.
– It goes without saying that I love reading about strong female characters with true agency in general. Fascinating that this is done in a book about the issues around magic that can take one’s agency away.
– Including Leck in the story was the weakest part of it for me. He got in the way for me, and he was ultimately easy for Fire to defeat, anyway. I would have preferred simply making Jod or someone else the villain, letting him be either some sort of monster or some other manner of thing that was genuinely challenging to deal with. – I would have preferred separating this story from the Graceling world entirely, actually. I have trouble believing in a world with both Monsters and Gracelings in it anyway. If it were a separate world, FIRE would have been an interesting exploration, from a different direction, of issues of free will and volition and how one deals with power and powerful magic. – While Fire took a while to grow on me, I loved Fire and Brigan together from the start. – And I especially loved how, at the end, Fire–who is perfect in so many ways–needs to be assured that Brigan loves her rough edges, her awfulness. Because so few people in her world even see them. This sort of broke my heart open, in the best way.
– In many ways, as lnhammer says, this is a book about the problems of being surrounded by a Mary Sue field. Which is what lets Fire ultimately be a character we care about, rather than one who is not only literally almost too perfect to live, but also too perfect to read about. The more I think about this, the more fascinating that is, too.
Anyone else here read it yet? Want to talk about it?